This paper evaluates from a welfare perspective three policy alternatives for dealing with Dutch disease problems originating from cyclical movements in commodity prices: fiscal rules for government expenditures, capital controls, and taxes on domestic lending. A DSGE model of a small open...

In order to enhance fiscal sustainability and regain “investment grade” credit rating, in 2011 Colombia implemented a fiscal rule (FR) on the Central Government's structural balance. Investment grade was rapidly attained, and FR targets were complied with, until 2019. Using the Synthetic...

We show that some types of fiscal rules can mitigate the well-known procyclical bias in public capital expenditures. Past research has found that fiscal adjustment episodes coincide with large public investment cuts, a pattern we also document in a sample of 75 advanced and emerging economies...

This paper analyses the cyclicality of fiscal policy (discretionary versus automatic) for 28 advanced economies over 1995-2021 by paying special attention to the Covid-19 crisis. We find evidence that discretionary fiscal policy during the Covid-19 crisis (2020-2021) was significantly more...

This paper seeks to identify the most promising fiscal strategy to boost long-term economic growth in Argentina and quantify its effects. To this end, the authors updated a growth-diagnostics study for Argentina and corroborated that low appropriability of social returns and insufficient public...

Societies often rely on simple rules to restrict the size and behavior of governments. When fiscal and monetary policies are conducted by a discretionary and profligate government, I find that revenue ceilings vastly outperform debt, deficit and monetary rules, both in effectiveness at curbing...